Enter your email to subscribe:

Facing competitive pressure from Google Scholar and other open source search engines, as well as consumer pressure for a more "Google-like" search experience, both Westlaw and Lexis have announced they will be rolling out radically new search engines in the weeks and months ahead.

There’s a battle about to break out on your computer screen. On the third floor of West’s sprawling corporate headquarters outside Minneapolis, a veritable army of professionals has been working for nearly five years to create a revamped Westlaw. They are changing everything from the interface users see on their PC screens to all the technology that makes it work behind the scenes.

Known as WestlawNext, the new platform will debut February 1.

On its own suburban campus near Dayton, Ohio, LexisNexis—the other half of the duopoly that has ruled online legal research for almost 40 years (some call it “Wexis”)—is planning its own revamped platform. Referred to internally as New Lexis, it is slated to roll out publicly later this year on a date yet to be determined.

Both companies claim to be creating a legal research experience that will mimic the ease of use their customers have come to expect from the leading Internet search engine, Google.

The updated services come not a moment too soon, since the Mountain View, Calif.-based search engine has just gotten into the legal research business. In November, the company announced that its Scholar search engine now contains more than 80 years of U.S. case law from federal and state courts, as well as U.S. Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1791—all of it free.

You can read the rest of the story here. In the meantime, strap-in and buckle-up - I'm sure it'll be an interesting ride as we watch the commercial search engine companies figure out how to maintain their client base and revenue stream in the face of open source competition.